1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a method and apparatus for processing incoming data packets and in particular to method and apparatus for reducing overhead in processing data packets.
2. Description of the Related Art
Various communication systems, computer systems, and networks of computers transmit and receive information in the form of frames or data packets. That is, a message or a file may be broken up into many data packets and sent to another user or computer on the system or network. Each data packet is a separate entity on the transmission media. In the transmission of these data packets, a processing overhead exists in terms of the time needed to process the data packet.
Batching or consolidating single data packets into groups can reduce the processing overhead when compared to processing the same number of data packets separately. Consequently, consolidating data packets into a group or a super data packet can reduce the processing overhead since the system can process the super data packet a single time. Consolidating data packets into super data packets, however, presents some problems. Data packets may arrive on the transmission media asynchronously and at somewhat random intervals. In addition, data packets transmitted as a group from a source system do not always arrive as a group at the target or receiving system. That is, data packets from multiple connections may be interspersed among each other.
Some data processing systems include a special dedicated bit in the processing header of the data packets as a form of identification. This type of system, however, requires both the sending system and the receiving system to be aware of the dedicated bit, in order to decrease processing overhead of the data packets. The "header" is that portion of a message which contains control information for the message such as: one or more destination fields; the name of the originating station; an input sequence number; a character string indicating the type of message; and, a priority level for the message.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have a method and apparatus for consolidating data packets into groups to reduce the overhead necessary to process the data packets without requiring both the sending and receiving systems to observe a protocol which identifies batched data packets.